Tag Archives: #poetry

Repression

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How long have I chewed herbs,
Trying to forget you?

What was once a music inside me
Is now only my heartbeat

Your face ripples –
A reflection on the Lethe

The arpeggio of your laughter
Looped like a wormhole in my memory

How many suns did I reject
After dreaming of you?

What was once a heartbeat inside me
Is now only a muscle contracting

Your face is an amalgam
Of other portraits now

The decrescendo of your sigh
Cut in half like an earthworm in my memory

How many moons will I pocket
Trying to white you out?

 

Misunderstanding

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you were pulling
a wasp’s sting out of my back
after our fight
you were playing doctor
and i was patient

the wasp was scared
and i could feel you pulling
the hot sting out of the wasp, too
kissing the reddened skin
and saying gently, “don’t jerk”

and i could feel the release
of a thousand and one
wasp stings pulled from the frightened world
by your sad fingers
and tired eyes

 

Knowledge

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In order to have a complete nature
Full of all experiences
God needed to sin
To count it among His powers

So he made you and me
To commit our adulteries
Mature creations doing what God wished
Yet not what He ordered

Because All comes from God
God birthed Himself to forgive Himself
Which is all theological longhand
For this:

I have already forgiven myself
After the fashion of The
Being Who Needed to Know
Just like you, another piece of God, have done

 

soul

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the train moans like a ghost
and if it’s hauling coal
or cars of people
it’s pushing carbon
there and back

a ghost groans like a train
but do not ask of sonics
or metaphysica, for i am
a humble journalist only telling
what i heard

is it so, so mad
to wire a robot thus?
that it would metronome
a truer beat than people
in the way angels worship more cleanly

the consciousness of the giraffe
is what “looks” at me through black lashes
and not the entire giraffe at once
when i say unto you
the giraffe popped its neck looking moonward

there are more things in head and heaven
than there are in reality
that list in god’s brain always-and-eternally
incomplete of all things-at-once
(it is not so unusual upon waking)

Labyrinthine

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Out curls

Serpentine smoke

Into a Byzantine midnight

.

I can’t read these heiroglyphs

I carved for myself on the walls

Of my memory

My fingers pass along the grooves in the stone

But unread and unknown,

I keep a secret from myself

.

My memory holds a door with no handle,

A box with no locks,

A moldy book with wilting pages

And an hourglass with one grain of sand inside

For telling the present moment

.

Since my memory can’t photograph

It paints with watercolor

On a canvas of sand. I can make out

Serpentine smoke curling into a Byzantine lung

.

I can’t read these Arabic numerals.

These envelopes have dried my sandy tongue.

I can’t focus

At this oxygen bar, too many Cheshire cats smiling

At this hookah lounge

At the bottom of the dark, green wine bottle

Of my memory

.

My memory curls out

Like serpentine smoke

Into a Byzantine midnight